“Thank you for coming,” I told him.
Of course, he said nothing in response. Just shook his head. His phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out, checked the screen, and tucked it away again. I did him the courtesy of not looking. This was the last man I’d had sex with, and that’d been far too long ago. I wanted to hug him, to hold him. To feel his arms wrapped around me one more time.
Apparently, the dead get no such shelter.
He left without entering the viewing room. I almost followed him but I figured I’d haunted him enough already.
Instead, I wandered back to my corpse and sat beside my casket. I wondered what my body smelled like—if Mom had thought to spray my favorite perfume, Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion, inside. Probably not.
Soon, booming laughter hammered through the murmur of conversation and tinkling music. At first, I thought Uncle Mike must’ve told one of his raunchy jokes, but he wasn’t on the guest list. He’d been dead for years, now that I thought about it. I looked across the room. No one was laughing and yet the noise continued. I followed it back to the foyer, where a grand staircase stretched upward into the shadows. The maniacal noise—a woman laughing like a drunk hyena—came from upstairs. A dreadful chill ran through me, causing a momentary twinge of pain in all my healed wounds. Every wee slit ached for one brief moment. I didn’t want to go up there, but I suspected that the laughter must’ve come from a ghost like me. Perhaps this cackling spirit could help me understand what was happening to the Light in the sky and what other things in this dead new world I should avoid, aside from grass and sunshine.
The stairs didn’t groan as I climbed them. I had no reflection in the glass in the frames lining the stairs—pictures of the Lamb Family past and present. Beach vacations. Universal Studios. The St. Louis Arch. I paused in front of an old black and white picture of a chubby young man in a bow tie and a smirking blond with a pointed nose. They both held guitars. Upward I went, past more family portraits. Woodsy backdrops. Library backdrops. Fireplace backdrops. Most of the men had plump cheeks and big noses—clearly a Lamb Family trait.
At the top of the stairs, I walked down a shadowy hall. The closer I got to the laughter, the more horrible it sounded—somehow cold and yet frantic. Heart withering, I walked to the doorway of a tidy bedroom with a neatly made four-poster bed.
The ghost of a young man crouched over the ghost of an old woman on the floor. He had his back to me. His aura glowed pale white similar to mine, but hers was an inky grey. Her head tilted back, mouth gaping. Laughter erupted from her wrinkled face. I edged around them, closer. Through his translucent back, I saw him tickling her relentlessly, digging his fingers into her ribs and under her arms.
“Hey,” I said.
The man ignored me.
The old woman’s hands flapped like broken birds at him, trying to fight him off.
“Hey, stop.”
He kept right on tickling. Her laughter was like insects crawling through my ears and gnawing at my brain.
Anger swarmed inside me. I stepped forward, grabbed the man’s shoulder, and yanked him off her before I lost my resolve. As soon as his hands left her body, the old woman went still. As if someone had hit the off switch. Her head drooped sideways. Her heavy eyes were completely black. Not a rich black but an empty void.
I turned on the young man. He wore a crooked bow tie. I expected to see anger in his face and I braced to kick him square in the fellas.
He sadly shook his head. “I waited for decades for the chance to make her laugh again.”
His brow wrinkled. He couldn’t have been older than in his mid-twenties, and yet the weariness in his grey eyes betrayed his true age. Through the windows, the sky outside deepened. Rain pittered and pattered against the windows, growing in intensity with each passing minute.
“When she finally passed over, I feared she might drift upward into the broken Light.”
“Why do some ghosts go up there and some stay down here?” I said.
He shrugged. “It seems the ones with unfinished business stay below. Those who are done—or who have nothing to live for—drift upward.”
“Oh. Great.”
“But she came to me. I thought we’d exist happily ever after here in our family home. But a darkness festered within her. We had only three nights together. Then came the dreadful dawn. Now she sleeps all day. Every day.” He grabbed my wrists. “She’s like all the rest—all the others that have passed over since the Light in the sky broke. You must understand. Tickling her is the only way to make her laugh. She gets a little better at night, but it’s not the same. Not like when she was alive. Something’s broken inside her. She’s not my Honey Drop anymore. And then . . . And then the clock strikes three every night. And I have to hide.”
His words made little sense. I tried to step backward. “I . . . I’m sorry. Let me go.”
“If I could get my guitar out of the attic, I could play for her. If anything would make her better, it’d be that. We could do it together. We could.” He pulled me toward the hall, his grip as strong as iron. Where we touched, a harsh tingle ran through me. Like sticking my finger in a socket. “Help me. We can help each other. Two are better than one. There are things I can’t do alone.”
The thick ghost spun me around and wrapped his big arms around my waist. He lifted me off my feet and carried me into the hall. I clawed and pried at his fingers. Golden light flickered in our merged auras.
“Do you play guitar?” he whispered in my ear.
“Let go of me, you crazy fucker!”
“It’s okay. I can teach you. We can play together, you and I.”
I swung my head back to smash his face. My skull cracked against him, hard enough that that fireflies streaked across my vision. He grunted but his grip only tightened. That’s when I remembered my kitten heel. I snap-kicked my foot. The shoe popped upward. I snagged it out of the air and stabbed the heel backward into his face. This time, he howled in pain. I tumbled to the floor and crawled toward the stairs. When I looked back, he yanked the ghostly footwear out of his eye socket. A thin line of snotty ectoplasm stretched between his face and my shoe. I curled my toes, and the heel leapt out of his hand and back onto my foot.
“You bitch,” he said. Spittle sprayed over his chin. His eyeball slid down his cheek.
Downstairs, footsteps plodded, clicked, and clacked across the hardwood floors. I glanced down. A chubby young man in a navy blue suit walked my mom and aunt to the front door. The visitation must’ve been over. Mom and Connie walked outside onto the porch. I looked back. The chubby ghost plodded forward, hands outstretched.
“Please,” he said. “We can make such beautiful music, you and I. I know we can.”
That’s when Shannon’s words came back to me—about being trapped. I realized that if the man below shut the door, I’d be confined in this creepy old house with this crazy fucker. The man in the suit stood at the door, watching the women descend the porch steps. In the periphery of my vision, the ghost lunged forward. I threw myself down the stairs.
The world turned into a violent spinning crash. The hard steps bashed my shoulders, knees, and head, each blow a sledgehammer cracking into me. I thudded onto the foyer floor. The sound of rain oriented me to the front door, where the man waved goodbye to Mom and Connie. His hand reached for the doorknob.
I could only imagine what’d happen if he shut the door on me. I’d be trapped. Or split in two. I tucked and rolled through the doorway, only barely clearing the threshold. The heavy wood smacked into me, knocking me backward down the front porch steps. I toppled outside into the rain.
Agony burst through me.
Each drop of rain tore a watery canyon through my phantom form, shredding me. Riddling me. I screamed and collapsed in a heap of anguish. The rain acted as a machine gun blasting me with thousands of liquid bullets. I spilled down the wet walkway, ghost flesh torn, phantom bones shattered.
I tried to scream, but the rain bullets had rippe
d through my vocal cords. I tried to crawl toward the stairs, but couldn’t raise a hand with the droplets blasting through me. So instead, I collapsed while the rain ruptured all that I was.
5
My shattered body slid down the wet walkway, succumbing to gravity and the water’s flow. A thousand watery bullets drilled through me. I reached for the grass on either side of the concrete path but the blades only sliced my riddled hands.
I spilled onto the front sidewalk and finally into the gutter. More rain crashed through me, rupturing my eyes and shattering my bones. Nearby, footsteps crunched over gravel. Aunt Connie must’ve been taking my mom home. I grabbed blindly for the noise and grasped an ankle. Whoever it was unknowingly dragged me toward the car. Gravel raked across my chest and thighs, each stone a jagged blunt blade carving across my breasts and stomach.
A car door clicked open. This was my chance. If I didn’t make it inside the car, I’d be destroyed—just like old Jonathan Heck. A foot smashed down through my right shoulder. I screamed with what was left of my face. Another step crushed my elbow. Another flattened my wrist. My forearm. My bicep. Pain exploded through me. I collapsed, now crippled and unable to rise. More watery bullets sprayed through me. The car door slammed shut.
Somehow, I managed to roll what was left of me under the vehicle. At least for the moment, I had a respite from the pounding rain. I sobbed and cried, both from the agony and from gratefulness to have found shelter. Unimaginable pain crackled inside my busted arm. I clutched my mutilated appendage with my not-quite-so-mangled left hand. My eyes re-inflated. I was under the driver side of the car which meant it had been Aunt Connie who had crushed my arm that now resembled a limp fire hose.
The station wagon’s engine roared to life. Panic boiled inside me. I only had a few seconds to act. My only chance was to stay under the car, but no way did I have the strength to hold onto the undercarriage—not after all that I’d just endured.
I saw only one option and it was going to hurt. A lot. I wrapped my mangled arm twice around the closest metal rod. Each movement sent a bolt of suffering through my very core. With what was left of my teeth clenched, I tied my arm into a messy clove hitch to anchor me to the car.
An instant later, the undercarriage jolted. The engine grumbled and the vehicle jerked into motion. Gravel knives slashed across my back. Agony wailed inside my knotted arm. Then we were on the road, all smooth with water. The velocity pulled me upward like a kite. I bounced like a deflated ball between the street and the undercarriage. Metal and asphalt battered my already broken body. My tied-up, stretched-out arm flared with pain.
I screamed the whole way home. Connie made only one stop—at Nickell’s Quik Stop drive-thru to pick up two packs of Marlboro Lights. I listened to the transaction while sobbing in a crumpled heap beneath the grumbling car. My kitten heel clutched my foot and whimpered.
A short while later, the car turned into Mom’s driveway and dragged me up the inclined concrete.
“Thank you,” I said to the world—to the universe. “Thank you.”
Because the hurting was over, right?
Wrong.
One of the rear tires rolled to a stop over my foot, stretching my whole body taut between it and the spot where I’d tied my arm under the engine. I shrieked, but of course, no one heard. The car doors opened and shut. Cigarette butts fell to the driveway on either side of the car. One rolled beside me—still fuming—and the other was quickly extinguished by the rain. I watched two pairs of sensible shoes hurry across the lawn and into my home. Something in the engine above me ticked angrily, like a surly clock fed up with the same endless damn spinning. I tried reaching upward to untie myself from the undercarriage, but I was stretched out too far. Tears squirmed out of my face, floating freely into the air. I blew them away and collapsed, exhausted and trapped beneath this hulking beast of machinery with nasty cigarette smoke drifting through me.
Once again, the smoke reminded me of how Jeremy’s Camry used to reek of cigarettes.
He and I had settled in the upscale neighborhood of Hyde Park in Cincinnati after he’d landed a solid engineering job at the Toyota plant in Erlanger, Kentucky. We bought a home that was both smaller and more expensive than we’d wanted, but we could walk to trendy restaurants and cafes. We had eighteen blissful months of marriage before he earned a promotion that meant him moving to the larger manufacturing facility in Georgetown, Kentucky. That added an extra hour to his commute, but he didn’t seem to mind. The money made it worth it, he said.
But after a few weeks, he came home angry. More distant. I thought at first it was because he was getting up so early and coming home so late. But no, it was talk radio. He spent the extra two hours of driving each day filling his head with the senseless ranting of mic jockeys who preyed on fear and stoked aggression. He and I couldn’t sit down for dinner and have a decent conversation without it turning into a diatribe about the lower class or homosexuals or immigrants or big government. Before long, he started buying guns. A lot of them. And not just handguns.
“You can sleepwalk through life if you want to, Mol,” he said after coming home with an AK-47. “But when the government’s stormtroopers come for us, I aim to defend our freedom. I’m arming up.”
He took up smoking, too. He’d come home reeking of tobacco. I could never seem to get the smell out of his clothes. We had a room that we used as a study, and he’d sit in there with the windows open, smoking cigarettes and devouring conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, I’d sit downstairs and sip on wine all night long. Wine bottles and bullets, that’s where most of our extra cash went.
Those long slurred evenings had been hell, but nothing compared to the torture I was experiencing now.
Agony gnawed at my joints like a puppy with a bone. All I could do was wait and heal and suffer, stretched out like some blubbering hammock while my shredded body stitched back together. All the busted bits inside me squirmed like maggots. My ghostly flesh became whole again, except for my flattened foot and stretched out arm.
Eventually, the rain slowed to a stop and yet the world only darkened. It must’ve been after sunset. Several voices murmured nearby, and I wondered if perhaps my viewing was meant to be a more private affair. Maybe Mom had decided for some reason to host a wake at her home. Yes, that must’ve been it. And I was missing my own party.
My healed hand tried and tried to untie my arm from the goddamn station wagon, but I was still stretched too taut. There was no give.
The front door opened and closed. My aunt’s shoes followed a weaving path to the car. Connie sniffled and burped before opening the door. “What a fucking mess,” she said, and the car lurched under her weight.
I steeled my resolve. This was going to suck beyond the telling.
The engine cleared its throat. The transmission jolted. The voices continued murmuring. Someone laughed. As the car backed out of the driveway, the tire rolled off my foot. I gasped with anguished relief and tucked the mangled mess of my leg out of the way. Teeth clenched, I grasped the undercarriage with my one free hand. The station wagon lurched into the street, dragging me across the asphalt.
This was it. I only had a few seconds before she drove off. I heard the window gliding down. Hopefully she was pausing to light up a smoke. I fumbled with my knotted arm, all squishy like a rotten orange. Somehow I managed to loosen it. The undercarriage jerked. I pulled my arm free and flattened out my body. The car rolled away, leaving a haze of pale cigarette smoke floating above me.
I sat up in the street, clutching my maimed arm. When I turned toward the house, I expected to see all the lights on. Perhaps some silhouettes in the windows. Lots of eating and drinking and toasts in my memory.
No.
The house was as dark and still as a grave. No lights on. I scooted onto the curb, in case a car should pass by. Surely I’d endured enough pain for one night. That’s when I saw the source of all the voices.
From ghosts, of course. The neighborhood was full of gho
sts.
6
THE DARKNESS
At last, the sun slinked away into the horizon. The Darkness stretched and yawned inside its countless disciples. It witnessed this side of the world’s blissful darkening through countless pairs of eclipsed eyes.
For millennia, the Light and the Darkness had wrestled here on Earth. Now, the Darkness had an edge. The Light was bloated on its own shortsighted stupidity—the folly of its endless shining. It had fed and nourished humanity for centuries, offering them endless dawns for their continued worship. In return, the Light reclaimed humanity’s souls, keeping them fresh and new.
Except now, the Light was broken, giving the Darkness the opportunity to infect most of the souls left stranded here on Earth. The weight of their lives kept them earthbound, and the Darkness overtook them. Not so with the others, those souls who’d drifted upward to wait stupidly for the Light to repair itself. Those souls, for the moment, remained out of the Darkness’s reach. But the shadows were no longer content to nibble at the edges of dawn and dusk.
It was time to rise. To spread. To grow. To restore the balance and once again plunge this world into peaceful darkness. A calm serene blackness unbroken by luminosity.
With its many eyes, the Darkness spied two as-of-yet uncaptured flickers of light—a girl ghost wandering in the woods and a female phantom trapped beneath a car. The latter freed herself as the vehicle drove away. She sat on the curb, oblivious to what was coming for her.
The hour drew near.
7
After graduating from Davis High School, Jeremy and I both moved a few miles away to attend college in Dayton. He went to University of Dayton, and I majored in Communications at Wright State. We’d spent most of our weekends hanging out in UD’s Ghetto, the rowdy neighborhood of leased student houses that stood almost shoulder-to-shoulder. We’d drift from porch to porch, sipping watery domestic from bottomless red plastic Solo cups. The stink of cheap beer and young sweat hung thick in the air.